California dairyman starts fresh in Somerset

Imagine picking up and moving 2,700 miles cross country to a place you only know from pictures and starting all over again from scratch. It would seem challenging to say the least.

But, when Andy and Ronica Zylstra and their four sons were faced with some difficult decisions in January, the California natives knew life would never be the same.

Andy Zylstra has been dairy farming with his parents, Arjen and Nina Zylstra, now retired, all his life. His father started farming in the 1950s, years before Andy was ever born.

“I have been involved with our family dairy farm all my life,” said Andy. “I started running the dairy farm for my father around the late 80s. After a few years of getting my feet wet in the business of cows and crops, my father turned the reins over to me with a guiding hand.”

While the dairy originally had about 250 head of Holstein milking and dry cows and supporting livestock and about 120 acres of ground, it grew into 750 milking cows and dry cows and 250 acres, some of which was rented.

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Andy Zylstra was not the average farmer. He was an advocate of conservation tillage and spoke at several different conferences and summits. He won the dairy division of the Leopold Conservation Award in 2007. He also served as president of California Dairy Campaign, a dairy producer organization of more than 350 members.

Things were going pretty well after all these years in San Joaquin Valley south of Sacramento in Stanislaus County, the third largest county for dairy in the nation.

Then earlier this year, things turned for the worse. Zylstra’s marketing cooperative had an agreement with three different processors to buy 19 truckloads of milk every day. There were about 20 dairies involved in the cooperative agreement. Two of the processors started canceling contracts because of production capacities.

In other words, there was no home for some of the milk. The Zylstras and other families in the agreement had to then find a buyer for those loads of milk not purchased. Some of that milk was shipped to Texas, Idaho and Nevada.

“We said to ourselves in January, ‘we’ve got to do something,’” said Andy. “For 18 years we had an agreement with one of the processors and everything was fine. We started shipping milk with them when they first opened their doors. Then, they told us within the next few years, they were gradually reducing our milk load to zero.”

One may think it would be easy to just pick up another processing company. Even though California is a big dairy state, the infrastructure of dairy processing plants hasn’t been developed yet.

“There’s too much red tape in California to build plants to process the milk,” said Andy. “My father said it’s the worst he’s ever seen since he started dairying. It’s like a slow death, a slippery slope.”

Andy, who was on the Cal West board of directors, worked with other dairymen to ship some of the milk to other states.

“The processors want to be more efficient and more effective just like any other business and it costs less to stop at one dairy, instead of several dairies,” he said.

So, the Zylstra family had some hard choices to make. They could sell everything and at 38 years old, Andy Zylstra could try something else. Or, they could sell and start fresh somewhere else, where the processing problems did not exist on the same scale.

When they made these decisions, they were not only making them for their own family but also two Hispanic families who had been helping them for years. Mario Padilla, who has a wife and three children, had been employed by the Zylstras for 14 years, and Fernando Davalos, who has a wife and three children, had been employed by the Zylstras for two years.

If he quit the dairy business, he knew Mario and Fernando would be forced to look for work in an economic situation where lots of other men were also trying to find new jobs as well. Many dairies in California have been closing down and many farm workers are now without jobs.

“I gave Mario and Fernando the opportunity to come with us and they realized the situation was bad in California and it would probably have been difficult for them to find work,” said Andy. “We were glad they made the choice to come to Pennsylvania because they have been helping my family for a long time.”

The Zylstras were married in May 1995 and have four sons, Riley, 6; Spencer, 8; Cory, 10; and Tanner, 12. They now attend Somerset Area School District.

“It hasn’t been easy but we knew we had four boys to raise,” remarked Ronica Zylstra, whose parents still live in California. “We didn’t want to leave but had few choices.”

The Zylstras started looking at farms in Iowa, Illinois, Florida, Washington and Pennsylvania on www.dairyrealty.com.